The Night They Tore Old Dixie Down

The Band's iconic song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," released in 1969, features Virgil
Caine, a Confederate soldier who served on the Danville, VA supply train which had, once again, suffered destruction of the tracks at the hands of Union Major General John Stoneham's calvary.

The song, written by Robbie Robertson, talks about the last days of the Civil War (or the War Between the States if you are a southern loyalist) and the suffering of soldier and family. It's not a happy song but it's also not a song that overly romanticizes.

The reasons for and legitimacy of the Southern states' secession from the Union are hotly debated... even 150 years later. Many southerners describe the issues of federal power versus states' rights, economic/ tax fairness issues between the northern states and southern states, and political power/representation inequality as being major causal issues in the mid 1800's. No living southerner I know attempts to defend what is clearly the elephant in the room... slavery. It is disingenuous, however, for southern loyalists to say that slavery and the states' decision making power regarding slavery was not the major issue that overwhelms all the other issues. The fact that slavery had some defenders (or, at a minimum, people who were ambivalent) in the north does not change the most basic point. The southern states wanted to maintain the right to allow slavery and even expand it into the newer western states; the abolitionist sentiment in the north had severely strained the relationship between north and south. While slaveholders represented a very small percentage of the total southern population, the benefit of that economic "system" was not something southern leaders were willing to relinquish.

So, the southern states seceded and the war was on. The country, which was then less than 100 years old, was breaking apart and many felt that this could not be allowed to happen. (I believe that neither the Union nor the Confederacy could have survived long term separated from one another.)

Fast forward.... the South is defeated....soundly. The South is devastated both economically and psychologically... that's what happens when you are on the losing end of a war. But the war ends and the country has to be restored. But, in some ways, due to guilt, shame, inability to accept that the south lost, inability to accept that the north won the right to invoke its will concerning the contested issues, and a host of other reasons, the idea of "the lost cause of the Confederacy" arose which attempted to provide some amount of redemption for those that fought against the Union.

Confederate monuments began to be erected shortly after the war ended, and continued for years afterward. In 1911, the year that marked the 50 year anniversary of the war's outbreak, there were a significant number of monuments put up. These monuments and statues honored soldiers like General Robert E. Lee all the way down to soldiers like Sergeant Berry Benson, whose likeness sits atop the Confederate Monument in Augusta, GA. According to Wikipedia, there are over 1500 various symbols of the confederacy on public spaces across the United States. This includes statues, names on schools, roads, parks, bridges, counties, cities, lakes, dams, military bases, and other public works.

Today there is a renewed effort to rid the country of all things that might even suggest that the Confederate "cause" was honorable in any way. Some want to extinguish all visible symbols of the

Monument of African American Confederate soldiers

Confederacy and any persons who fought for or were sympathetic to that cause. Civil wars are unlike other country-versus-country wars. These wars involve a country tearing itself apart. For a civil war to end, the fighting has to eventually stop, even after soldiers stop shooting at one another....especially after the soldiers stop shooting at one another. If not, healing never occurs. In many ways, the racial strife we still see today is due to that war never truly coming to an end. And that's painfully unfortunate. Sadly, slavery in the South was replaced by segregation. And we had hoped that the evil and attitudes of segregation had been beaten into submission 50 years ago.

I just don't see, though, what tearing down all these monuments accomplishes unless it's seen as a way to exact some new punishment for the past sins of slavery and segregation. But then what? Does it solve a single problem? Some may think that we still need to tear Old Dixie down. While tearing down may not create another war with armed soldier combatants, it does run the risk of causing so much bitterness that we effectively launch a whole new civil war. And no one wins that one. Let's allow those monuments to be reminders that we cannot ever do that to ourselves again.